This article seeks to initiate discourse around the vibrant and somewhat uncharted electroacoustic weave that significantly contributes to Ireland's musical tapestry through a consideration of six diverse threads: Softday, Jennifer Walshe, Karen Power, Linda Buckley, Fergal Dowling and Jonathan Nangle. Investigation of Ireland's recent electroacoustic scene will confirm that an emerging DIY aesthetic aligns with international trends of the past decade, with pop-up events, improvisation groups, experimental music collectives and intermedia festivals providing avenues for collaborative and creative expression. It will provide contrasting, yet interconnected examples of what will be termed ‘DIYing’ including a discussion of influences, concepts, practices and brief analyses of works. It is hoped that this article will see the beginning of a wider acknowledgement of the rich musical dialogues that are taking place.

The toy piano is fast becoming a concert instrument in its own right, with its own (growing) body of repertoire that has moved well beyond John Cage's 1948 classic Suite for Toy Piano. There are dedicated musicians specialising in toy piano performance all over the world, and numerous composers producing new works written specifically for the toy piano. This unusual miniature instrument provides a respite from the traditional implications of the grand piano, breaks the ice with audiences and allows pianists to perform in locations that would otherwise be inaccessible. In this article the author introduces the history and mechanism of the instrument, performance considerations, extended techniques and approaches to working with electronics, recent repertoire and suggestions for performers and composers. Discussion is supplemented with musical examples.

While fragility is typically defined as ‘the quality of being easily broken or damaged’, within a musical framework the term can be understood through a myriad of causal lenses. One must consider what can be ‘broken’ or damaged’ in a musical context, and secondly how this sense of impairment might present itself. This article offers an extensive categorisation of musical fragility, and a characterisation of it in its numerous forms across the works of a broad range of composers. Through classification, a distinction between local and large-scale fragility emerges. A typology of fragilities makes it possible both to identify them in works that might not necessarily be considered fragile and to identify works that use combinations of fragility types. This classification involves ten types, with compositions from new and experimental acoustic music offered as examples.

The music of composer Klaus Lang (b. 1971) is often overlooked in broader discussions of New Music in Europe, and is little discussed outside of his native Austria. When his music is discussed, it is usually in relation to its fragile textures and extreme quietness. However, the notion of time in its various guises also plays a key role in Lang's work, and it is the scale and structure rather than volume and timbre of his music that this article probes. This paper looks at the construction and configuration of time in Lang's music utilising the writings of Henri Bergson, and specifically the notion of duration as a mediation of time and consciousness. I suggest that Lang's work is predicated on the fragile balancing of conscious and ‘clock’ time, creating structures that destabilise our perception of temporality in his work.

During the 1980s, Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss, founder of the Al-Kindi ensemble of Aleppo, invented a qānūn in just intonation with which he attempted to solve a major discrepancy between the theory and practice of maqām-scales. Weiss objected to the introduction of Western standards, observing that they distort the significance of interval ratios and prevent a comparative understanding of the modal system as a transnational phenomenon. In the twentieth century, the implementation of equal-semitone temperament emerged simultaneously with a notable invasion of sociological criteria into musical inquiry. The polarity observed between westernisation and tradition can be seen most visibly in the present search for identity amongst Middle- and Near-Eastern musicians, but this schismogenic process can also be observed in the history of the Western avant-garde, where microtonal explorations have been halted in favour of extra-musical conceptuality. While cross-cultural musicians are faced with a new climate of distrust, it seems most likely that the principles that draw us apart may originate in the very patterns of thought in which our notion of culture operates. Weiss's tuning system may serve as a helpful tool to foster a new and universal epistemology of tone, bridging and transcending the apparent contradictions between the two spheres.

This short article draws on, without mentioning, a very large body of works written over a very long period of time which share a common critique of the musical canon of great works as traditionally conceived. Chief among the musicologists drawn from are Georgina Born and Lydia Goehr (especially The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works). Readers familiar with these criticisms can safely skip to the final two sections, which explain why I am reinventing this particular musicological wheel at this moment in time. While I believe my framing is reasonably novel, I am under no illusions that the argument being made here is a new one. Nevertheless, the emphasis on community and practice feels urgent and perhaps merits retelling a story that is by now very old indeed.

For four years now, the London Contemporary Music Festival has been organising some of the most exciting new music events in town. In contrast to the eclectic extravaganzas of previous years, LCMF 2016 was tightly focused: three nights only, dedicated to the work of Julius Eastman. The programme was a revelation, even for those who are aware of Eastman and his music.

Impuls, the International Ensemble and Composition Academy for Contemporary Music, has in the past offered a workshop that deviates from the main activities of instrumental classes and ensemble work, composition classes, lectures, and call-for-score reading sessions, taking the form of an intensive course which plays with the grey areas between composer and performer, performance and installation, cochlear and non-cochlear music. In 2017, with the Academy now in its tenth edition, the focus of this workshop moved from ‘Composition Beyond Music’, led in recent years by Peter Ablinger (2013) and by Georg Nussbaumer (2015), to ‘Collaboratory’, a new workshop led by Belgian composer/performer Stefan Prins, imagined in collaboration with Ute Pinter, the festival's secretary general.

Why Swedish contemporary music over the past few decades has been such a provincial affair is a mystery. Most of the pieces receiving critical attention from the media are using neo-Romantic aesthetics – bombastic orchestral sounds more connected to the world of Richard Strauss than Helmut Lachenmann. Hearing this type of music, often characterised by its excesses of art nouveau ornamentations, one may wonder what century one is living in. Where is the contemporary world?

On a gloomy winter's night in Dalston what could be better than Kammerklang at Café OTO? Out of the cold and into a packed house – standing room only for many of us, and sauna-like levels of humidity – for an evening in which an audio-visual piece about bells by Christine Sun Kim and a new string quartet by Lisa Illean frame the main event, two new pieces by the Canadian composer Cassandra Miller.

In the heart of the University of Huddersfield's Creative Arts Building sits the unassuming Phipps Hall, which has given itself over to five days of total electronic sound immersion. The University has grown accustomed to attracting pioneering artists in contemporary music over the last four decades, both to its in-house research centre CeReNeM, and to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival every November. The relatively younger Electric Spring Festival takes place every February and is now able to stand alongside its older sibling, offering the public an impressive and diverse programme of composers and artists specialising in electronic sound manipulation. This year was no exception. Running from 22 to 26 February, there was something to suit everyone, from improvised live-coded dance music to classic musique concrète masterpieces. From its conception in 1995, the aim of the festival has been to offer breadth and surprise to its audience.

Unlike many other New Music festivals, Eclat has so far resisted the temptation to build the festival programmes around central themes. The Eclat festival is one of the major annual gatherings of the German and international scene for contemporary music, taking place in Stuttgart and organised by ‘Musik der Jahrhunderte’ (Christine Fischer) in collaboration with the SWR (Lydia Jeschke). The lack of a central theme doesn't indicate a pragmatic or vague approach to curation, but the festival organisers’ aim to assemble a selection of artists, ensembles and pieces that are either directly asking or indirectly raising questions considered relevant and at the forefront of the scene's discourse at the time of the event.

As the audience's rustling quietens along with the memories of everyday pulses, ethereal sounds appear. We are at Helsinki's iconic Rock Church, on the eighth night of the biennial Musica nova festival for contemporary music. The Helsinki Chamber Choir sound the first, lingering lines of György Ligeti's Lux Aeterna from the balcony, behind the audience. The peculiar acoustics give the illusion that the choir is hidden in between the crevasses and cracks of the stone wall in front. The listener is surrounded. Marvellously kept together by Nils Schweckendiek, the singers transform the colour of their voices into sine-tones and oboes in a strangely soothing way. This rendition now somewhat more present than the night before, when the choir echoed the same micropolyphonic lines across the aula of the Kiasma art museum. There the cool distance of the work really spoke in a mesmerising way, with an unreachable caress.